Transnational Cinema, Hybrid Identities and the Films of Evans Chan

September 21, 2013 Posted by Webmaster under Volume 08, Number 2, January 1998

Gina Marchetti

University of Maryland and
Nanyang Technological University
tgmarchetti@ntu.edu.sg

 

 

Figures 1 and 2: Posters for To Liv(e) and Crossings.

 

Introduction

 

This article looks at the changing shapes of global Chinese cinema through the works of Hong Kong/New York filmmaker Evans Chan. As Chinese films cross beyond traditional borders, they move in directions and among audiences far removed from the Hong Kong, Taiwan, Southeast Asian, and “Chinatown” markets that transnational Chinese cinema addressed from its inception. From the edges of Hong Kong’s traditional markets, there emerges a new kind of film culture, mingling more freely with Taiwan and the PRC, drawing on the overseas Chinese experience, produced by filmmakers who often live outside Asia. This give and take between Hong Kong (or China) and the world necessitates a new way of thinking about film culture that transcends the linguistic and cultural determinism of national cinema as well as the aesthetic strictures of established auteurs, genres, and styles.

 

Thinking Beyond Culture

 

The politics of multiculturalism has recently been hotly debated within American society. However, few efforts have gone beyond the “smorgasbord” approach to culture. A “taste” of African music, a sampling of Latin American literature, an appreciation of a Chinese holiday represent tokenism at its worst or the frustrations of identity politics seeking to convey the essence of a culture to the broader body politic with little more than a tourist’s gaze. Scholarship coming from a variety of disciplines has sought to engage this problem (see Shohat and Stam). How can culture be looked at within the context of a national body politic when that body is divided by race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality? Postcolonial theory has contributed the notion of hybridity to these debates, and a call to place all notions of an “essential” identity into question within the multiple identities available within the postmodern metropolis (see Bhabha and Chow). Others call for a “radical” multiculturalism that refuses to conceal the issues of power and struggle behind the “melting pot” veneer of contemporary culture (see West). Within these debates, the centrality of the economy and globalization of the culture industry cannot be neglected. Filmmakers, for example, may live in one country, make all their films in a second country, and find financing in a third, while hoping to address a global, polyglot audience with a localized narrative. Because of the transnational nature of these films, a new, “transcultural” politics of representation needs to be elucidated.1.

 

The oeuvre of Evans Chan can be taken as a case study of the difficulty and the necessity of developing a transcultural approach within film studies. Chan is a New York-based filmmaker, born in mainland China, bred in Macao, educated in Hong Kong and America, who makes independent narrative films primarily for a Hong Kong, overseas Chinese, “greater China” audience. His films straddle the gulf between the international art film and Hong Kong commercial cinema, and thus have also attracted some international art film viewers.

 

To date, Chan has completed two features, To Liv(e)2 (1991) and Crossings3 (1994). Both these films openly address issues that find only a marginal voice in the mainstream cinema of Hong Kong and the United States. With one foot in the United States and the other in Hong Kong, Chan can freely address diverse issues. His films look at Hong Kong’s return to China in 1997 and the legacy of June 4th in Tian’anmen Square. Both examine the role of women in the world economy (in the “official” economy and the “informal sector” that can include prostitutes and traffickers in narcotics). Each film looks at the processes of immigration and dispersal involving the Chinese globally. While fears of censorship arising from Hong Kong’s laws and the unofficial censorship of the marketplace in the United States place a boundary around what can be said in the cinema, Chan, with his transnational production team, manages to seriously explore controversial topics. In this way, Chan creates a transnational, transcultural discourse through the medium of the motion picture, pointing to a new type of cultural sphere that must be noted within film studies (see Lu, Franncia, and Fore).

 

Determining Indeterminacy: To Liv(e) and Crossings

 

In The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System, Fredric Jameson devotes a chapter to Edward Yang’s Terrorizer. Jameson notes that the film is poised between the modern and the postmodern:

 

What we must admire, therefore, is the way in which the filmmaker has arranged for these two powerful interpretative temptations--the modern and the postmodern, subjectivity and textuality--to neutralize each other, to hold each other in one long suspension in such a way that the film can exploit and draw on the benefits of both, without having to commit itself to either as some definitive reading, or as some definitive formal and stylistic category. Besides Edward Yang's evident personal mastery, the possibility of this kind of mutually reinforcing suspension may owe something to the situation of Third-World cinema itself, in traditions in which neither modernist nor postmodern impulses are internally generated, so that both arrive in the field of production with a certain chronological simultaneity in full post-war modernization. (151)

 

To Liv(e) and Crossings can be looked at in a similar way. They can be seen as works suspended between the modern and the postmodern; indeed, their textual strategies rely on this deeply rooted indeterminacy to explore people and issues that are themselves difficult to determine.

 

Like Yang, Chan is profoundly influenced by European cinema. The English title, To Liv(e), for example, conjures up both Godard and Gorin’s Letter to Jane as well as Ingmar Bergman’s many works with Liv Ullmann. Chan characterizes the film as “inevitably a response to both Bergman and Godard” (Chan 6). Chan’s film can be looked at as part of the international New Wave discussed by Robert Kolker in The Altering Eye. In her insightful essay on the film, “The Aesthetics of Protest: Evans Chan’s To Liv(e),” Patricia Brett Erens outlines the various ways in which the film draws on Godard. As Erens observes, To Liv(e) favors an aesthetic sensibility rooted in a Brechtian tradition of dramatic distance and political engagement.

 

Peter Wollen’s approach to Godard’s political films as “counter cinema” can be used here to further elucidate this legacy in both To Liv(e) and Crossings. To Liv(e), for example, is organized around a series of letters addressed to Liv Ullmann. These letters admonish Ullmann for her criticism of Hong Kong’s deportation of Vietnamese “boat people” in December, 1989. Ullmann fails to mention Hong Kong’s own uncertain future when it becomes part of the People’s Republic of China, still bloodied from the events of that June. Rubie (Lindzay Chan) composes these letters, which are sometimes read as voice-overs and sometimes read by the character directly addressing the camera. The letters run parallel to other plot lines involving Rubie’s lover, family, and circle of friends.

 

The impact of Godard is clearly apparent in the scene in which Rubie reads her first letter to Liv. Over a shot of boats used as a transitional device, the tinny, hollow sound of a recording of Cui Jian’s “Nothing To My Name” comes up on the sound track. The camera pans across an audience; Rubie is seated in the auditorium. A dance performance “Exhausted Silkworms” [3 MB Quicktime Clip], inspired by the events of June 4th, takes place on stage. Three male dancers, dressed simply in white shirts and black pants, tear their clothes to form gags and, later, nooses. A red scarf is pulled out of one dancer’s shirt like spurting blood. As “Nothing To My Name” ends, one dancer falls, as if shot. Suspended for a moment with a freeze frame, he finally lands on the ground, as the audience applauds.

 

This performance is layered by the inclusion of Rubie’s first letter as a voice-over. As the dancers perform, Rubie’s address to Liv Ullmann (and, through her, to the world at large) adds another dimension to both Cui Jian’s rock music, which says nothing explicit about “democracy” or politics at all, and to the performers’ reenactment of the Tian’anmen demonstration and its suppression. As the dancers act out this violence, accompanied by Cui Jian’s harsh and direct vocals, Rubie likens Liv Ullmann to a respected, distant portrait that comes to life and slaps her in the face with accusations of cruelty and indifference. Rubie not only complains of Ullmann’s ignorance about the Hong Kong situation that her statement about the Vietnamese displays, but also questions her timing. Speaking just months after Tian’anmen, an event that was taken by many in Hong Kong as a barometer of what to expect after 1997, Rubie reminds Ullmann that the population of Hong Kong may soon find themselves in the same boat, so to speak, as the Vietnamese.

 

In this scene there is a juxtaposition of two visual planes. One features Rubie as the originator of the letter. Close-ups of her face accompany the voice-over presentation of the contents of the letter, grounding the letter in the person of Rubie as a fictional character. The other visual plane, using the same images, features Rubie as a spectator, clearly moved by the dance presentation. There are also two audio planes: Cui Jian’s music and the sounds of the auditorium on one, and Rubie’s voice-over letter to Liv on the other. In this fragmented presentation of narrative information, all the elements of “counter cinema” come into play. Narrative intransitivity comes to the fore in the casual introduction of an evening at the theatre for Rubie’s character; time is thrown out of synch because Rubie writes the letter heard in the voice-over at another time and in another place away from the theatre. There is an estrangement from the character of Rubie as she becomes a mouthpiece for the people of Hong Kong, addressing an actual person about actual events, in addition to being a fictional character involved in other plot developments. Her address is not to other fictional characters, but to Liv, and to the world at large represented by the film audience. Foregrounding occurs as the film spectators are invited to see themselves as witnesses to the dance performance, and, by extension, the events in Tian’anmen, and think of themselves, with Rubie, as something more than spectators. Watching Rubie look at a political work of art foregrounds To Liv(e)‘s own status as a similar work of political commentary. The diegesis splits, featuring a self-contained performance work within the film. Aperture must be noted, since an understanding of the references in the dance depends on a familiarity with the mass media spectacle of June 4th, including photos of the demonstrators standing together in the square, Cui Jian’s presence, etc. The unpleasure of the breaking of classical conventions is self-evident, as is the non-fictional basis of the entire scene as a commentary on actual events; i.e., the expulsion of the Vietnamese, Ullmann’s trip to Hong Kong and public condemnation of Hong Kong’s action, the events of June 4th in Tian’anmen, etc. Fictional and non-fictional realms overlap.

 

However, it would be wrong to conclude that To Liv(e) is simply an imitation of Godard. There is another element to this scene that takes the film in a radically different direction. While Rubie is presented as an agent addressing Ullmann, a spokesperson for Hong Kong, and as a spectator of a dance piece (and, by extension, a political event), Rubie is also depicted as distracted. Near the beginning of the scene, she looks at her watch and looks around the auditorium. Later, the fact that Rubie is waiting for her brother, Tony (Wong Yiu-Ming), is revealed. Rubie’s relationship with her brother, his fiancée, and her family propels the film into another, totally different arena, i.e., the realm of the love story and family melodrama. Rubie may be the voice of Hong Kong, but she also plays the roles of daughter, sister, lover, and friend in other parts of the narrative. Her distraction as a character points to a more general “distraction” found within the narrative itself. To echo Jameson, the “textuality” of counter cinema meets the “subjectivity” of the melodrama, the “woman’s film,” and the love story.

 

Figure 3: Rubie’s brother Tony (Wong Yiu-Ming) in an intimate pose with his financée, Teresa (Josephine Ku), in To Liv(e) (production still).
Figure 4: Tony with Teresa (production still).

 

There is a similar sense of distraction in Crossings. While less directly indebted to the European New Wave, Crossings still bears the marks of cinematic modernism. Again, fiction and non-fiction overlap as actual footage of Tian’anmen 1989 is cut into newscasts in which fictional characters appear. Dance presentations divide the diegesis further into self-contained fictional realms. Characters again function as mouthpieces for policies or ideas as well as fictional creations involved in narrative events. Rubie (again played by Lindzay Chan) reappears to serve this function again, appearing on New York television as the public voice of the Chinatown community and, through voice-over excerpts from a diary, as the personal voice of the Hong Kong emigrant. However, while To Liv(e) has more clearly demarcated divisions between the various layers of the discourse, Crossings, closer to Yang’s Terrorizer and other works of the Taiwanese and Hong Kong New Wave, experiments with time and space to a much larger degree. Distraction, in fact, becomes disorientation, since from scene to scene it is often difficult to figure out whether the location is New York or Hong Kong.

 

In one scene, for example, Mo-Yung (Anita Yuen), the film’s female lead, has just finished a meeting with Rubie in Central Park. She walks past a shop window displaying a model airliner. The film cuts to a shot of clouds passing over the moon, followed by a graphic match on a toilet bowl. Mo-Yung is vomiting. Members of her family come back from a shopping trip and notice the smell of the vomit. In this case, the transition from New York City to Hong Kong and earlier story events is quite abrupt. The shot in the bathroom offers no clue to Mo-Yung’s whereabouts. Rather, this disorienting presentation of time and place mirrors the contemporary experience of immigration. Unlike previous generations of explorers, pilgrims, colonialists, pirates, and other travellers, contemporary wanderers travel according to a different set of rules and restrictions. Instantaneous communication via international telephone lines connects the spaces again in a different way. (Later, in the scene mentioned above, Mo-Yung receives a call from her boyfriend Benny [Simon Yam] in New York, again reorganizing the sense of space presented in the film.) Jet travel condenses the time and space between New York and Hong Kong even further. If the spectator is disoriented following the character’s disorientation, then the fictional world simply reflects a postmodern experience of time and space.

 

Here, Jameson’s difficulty with Yang’s Terrorizer as both modern and postmodern begins to make sense for To Liv(e) and Crossings as well. While both have elements of counter cinema and both fit within the generic parameters of Hong Kong commercial film as love stories, crime stories, and melodramas, they seem to be doing something that adds up to more than just the sum of these modernist and commercial parts. They have a “schizophrenic” quality that can be seen in their titles. The English title, To Liv(e), is a deconstructed play on words referring to Liv Ullmann, Letter to Jane, and a heartfelt desire for the people of Hong Kong to somehow endure and “to live.” The title in Chinese, roughly translated as Love Songs From a Floating World, refers to the other face of the film that deals with romantic relationships and a Chinese tradition of misdirected and/or impossible love.

 

Crossings offers a similar case in point. The English title conjures up images of immigration, exile, nomadism, the modern metropolis as a “crossroads,” while the Chinese title, Wrong Love, refers to unhappy affairs of the heart. As the titles imply, these polyglot films offer a multiple address and, potentially, a multiple interpretation, or at least a divided ordering of narrative hierarchies, for the English-speaking, art film audience at festivals and art cinemas globally, for the expanding circle of Asian American film spectators, and for the Chinese-speaking audience looking at the films in relation to the standard Hong Kong commercial product.

 

However, it is wrong to look at the films as split discourses in this way, because another possible address needs to be taken into consideration. Rather than operating as a dialectic between the art film and the commercial love story, between English and Chinese, the films can be taken as palimpsests where the elements overlie one another, obscuring meaning for some, illuminating a different kind of meaning for others. A new meaning is not created through the clash of contradictory discourses, as can be seen in the work of Godard. Rather, layers sit on top of one another, some (almost) postcolonial in English, some diasporic and accented in American English, some (almost) post-socialist in Chinese, some modern and part of the tail end of an international New Wave, others postmodern and part of contemporary global cinema culture.

 

Although To Liv(e) and Crossings are quite different, more than a single director links the works together. Taken as a set, they comment on certain common themes (e.g., Hong Kong 1997, immigration, changing family and social relationships in “Greater China,” etc.) from two different temporal and spatial perspectives. To Liv(e) primarily looks at the edginess of Hong Kong residents who are able to leave, but may or may not leave before July 1997. Crossings looks primarily at newly transplanted Hong Kong émigrés in New York City, i.e., at immigration as a fait accompli rather than as a possibility. Two anchors hold these two films together. One is a contemplation of June 4th in Tian’anmen Square, and the other is Rubie. The first represents a common location away from both Hong Kong and the world beyond the People’s Republic at a specific point in time that galvanized the world’s attention on China. The other represents a certain face and voice that embody the socio-political as well as the personal, psychological issues addressed by both texts. Both Tian’anmen and Rubie are difficult to pin down, and it is the indeterminacy of both that forms the heart of this analysis of these films.

 

From Tian’anmen to Times Square

 

There has been a great deal of recent discussion of location within film and cultural studies circles (see Kaplan). Issues of where a scholar is located geographically, politically, and otherwise come up as concerns for evaluation of research. However, the positioning of any intellectual brings to bear many problems. As Rey Chow points out in her work on Chinese intellectuals, looking for an “authentic” voice or a “native” position presupposes an Orientalist belief in a pure and distinct other and represents a desire on the part of the critic rather than anything or anyone that actually exists (1-26).

 

To Liv(e) and Crossings are both positioned in a similarly mercurial way. While characters move around Hong Kong and New York City and talk about places as diverse as Australia, Canada, Scandinavia, Italy, and South Africa, the films inevitably come back to Beijing, specifically to Tian’anmen, as a starting point. While footage and still photos of the May-June 1989 demonstrations appear, no plot action occurs in Beijing. Indeed, very little is said about the demonstrations at all.4 (See Hinton.) Rather, Tian’anmen anchors the slippery identities of the films’ characters as well as the slippery identities those characters represent as citizens of Hong Kong or as immigrants elsewhere.

 

One scene in To Liv(e) brings to the fore this question of identity in relation to Tian’anmen. Rubie and her activist friend Trini have a snack in a Hong Kong noodle house after seeing an anti-nuclear performance. The scene begins as Trini talks about her family, resettled in England, and her white British husband. She is not keen to immigrate to England, however, because of the treatment she received from the British embassy while in Beijing during the demonstrations. She goes on at length about her experiences. At one point, she contacted the embassy to help some Hong Kong students escape arrest as “counter-revolutionaries.” The reply from the embassy was: “This should teach them a lesson. They should have thought twice before interfering with other people’s business.” On another occasion, Trini contacted the embassy for an escort to the airport. Her request was denied by the same staff member because her party was travelling on documents issued by the PRC government, implying that the bearers were considered Chinese citizens. Trini sums up the situation as follows:

 

The first time he denied us help was because we're non-Chinese and he advised us to "think twice before interfering with other people's business." The second time he refused to help was because we are Chinese. We're Chinese subjects travelling with our re-entry permit. Either way we lose! What does he want us to be? My conclusion is we're not British subjects. We're probably British objects--to be freely disposed of. (Wong 35)

 

In To Liv(e), Tian’anmen is filtered through the experiences of a number of characters. All of these experiences of Tian’anmen have one thing in common: the positioning of the characters as spectators. Rubie watches in the audience as dancers perform “Exhausted Silkworms” about the events in Tian’anmen. The newsreel footage of Hong Kong demonstrations in support of the Tian’anmen demonstrators illustrates one of Rubie’s letters. She listens as her friend, Trini, acting as an activist/journalist during the demonstrations, finally concludes that she was an outsider in Tian’anmen, a spectator rather than a participant. Trini notes, “We’re only onlookers. There’s no question about that.” Rubie also listens as Elsie Tu, a white resident of Hong Kong, a former missionary and social activist (playing herself) describes her reaction:

 

The Tian'anmen Massacre has thrown everything into a dilemma for me. On the one hand, I can't be disloyal to China. On the other hand, I can't accept what happened. I wonder, am I going to see the people I've been living with all my life be massacred if they speak up? In any case, I do plan to stay in Hong Kong till the end.... I've devoted all my life trying to make Hong Kong a better place and I, too, would like to know what happens here after 1997. (Wong 49)

 

Rubie, Elsie Tu, and Trini are all caught up in the problem of identity. Neither Chinese nor British, they are activists and onlookers uncertain of what they can or should be doing to help themselves and, by extension, Hong Kong.

 

In Crossings, the use of Tian’anmen as a point from which identity may or may not be determined continues. Here, the shift is from Hong Kong to New York’s Chinatown community. During the credit sequence, Rubie appears on a television news segment discussing apathy in the Chinese community on the anniversary of June 4th. Introduced by an image of the “Goddess of Democracy,” a woman newscaster remarks: “Almost five years after the Tian’anmen Square Massacre, amnesia seems to have set in New York’s Chinatown. Is the United States foreign policy toward China still obsessively based on a tragedy that has no bearing on today’s reality?” Rubie appears as an expert to answer this question. However, her reply is non-responsive: “I feel that China and America are intimately connected.” She continues as an off-screen voice, “Did you know the boots Chinese soldiers wore to put down the demonstrators were made in America and the gloves American medics wear to protect themselves from AIDS are made in China?”

 

Here, America is brought into the equation and implicated in the Tian’anmen events. However, the connection, like the connection of Rubie to the students and other demonstrators with whom she empathizes, remains vague. As Rubie comments on the anniversary of Tian’anmen off-screen, another character, the psychotic American, Joey (Ted Brunetti), laughs hysterically on screen, enjoying a joke with some imaginary cronies. Rubie’s observations on the political dimensions of the global economy are juxtaposed with Joey’s lunatic obsessions with Asia and Asian women.

 

At this point, Tian’anmen comes closer to another square, Times Square, as the center for New York’s sex trade. Times Square takes up as a spatial reference where Tian’anmen leaves off. The painter John (Fung Kin Chung), Rubie’s boyfriend in To Liv(e), laughingly mentions that he can always work as a street artist in Times Square, like his mainland counterparts. Indeed, struggling Chinese painters can be found on the streets of New York, Paris, and other cities, trying to eke out a living painting portraits and caricatures of tourists. John fears, though, that he is not as tough as these other artists. Later, a shot of Times Square appears in Crossings, but no artists are present. In this scene, Rubie compares New York to Chang An (Xi’an) during the Tang Dynasty as a “crossroads” of civilizations. From the Goddess of Democracy to the Statute of Liberty, from Tian’anmen to Times Square, the “crossroads” of China and America, specifically New York, point to an unsettling dislocation.

 

From Organic to Diasporic Intellectual

 

Contrasting the “traditional” with the “organic” intellectual, Antonio Gramsci saw the former as educated to maintain the status quo of the powers ascendant at that time, while the “organic” intellectual rose from the ranks of the subaltern classes in order to act as a mouthpiece for their concerns and empower them with a voice in the larger body politic. The idea of the “organic intellectual” has been influential in the thinking of many theorists since Gramsci. More recently, another view of public intellectuals has become current, i.e., the “diasporic” intellectual. Unlike the organic intellectual who remains rooted in the community from which he/she emerged, the diasporic intellectual moves between nations, cultures, languages, and other “positions.” Indeed, the “position” as well as the “location” of the diasporic intellectual is often difficult to pin down.

 

From the scattering of the Frankfurt School, to the postcoloniality of Said, Spivak, and Bhabha, to the work of Stuart Hall (see Chen) in cultural studies, the diasporic intellectual works from the perspective of exile and/or immigration, from the pain as well as the freedom of displacement.

 

In the character of Rubie, To Liv(e) and Crossings create a fictional representation of the process of transformation of a concerned, educated, “organic” intellectual into a “diasporic” intellectual. Like the activist Elsie Tu, who appears in To Liv(e) as the disillusioned British missionary/housewife turned urban activist, Rubie in Crossings leaves behind her roots in Hong Kong to take up the role of community activist and spokeswoman in New York City.

 

In this way, the character of Rubie (played by Lindzay Chan in both films) acts as the other bridge that links To Liv(e) and Crossings. Although it is never made explicit that a single, unified “Rubie” is exactly the same character in both films, the two Rubies clearly function in the same way in both texts and in most ways can be taken as a single character.

 

However, the possible identity of the two Rubies does not belie the fact that the character is presented as a conflicted, often contradictory presence in the two films. As such, she represents all those conflicts of identity central to the thematic dynamics of both films. On the one hand, her roots are found among the poorer quarters of Hong Kong society. During a scene depicting a rather uncomfortable family gathering, her father digresses on the family history as squatters selling groceries, moving from one temporary housing development to another, threatened by floods and ravaged by fire, as well as by corrupt officials demanding kickbacks for a business license. The family is taken under the wing of Elsie Tu, who uses her influence to set the family up in a legitimate shop.

 

From these lower middle class, small merchant roots, the children emerge as full-fledged members of Hong Kong’s professional/intellectual sector. Rubie is a journalist who becomes a community activist/social worker in New York. Her brother Tony is a highly skilled radiologist, and the eldest brother has successfully established himself in Canada. Unlike their parents, the children have the education and skills to move outside a Chinese environment into a global, English-based, diasporic community of post-colonial professionals and intellectuals plying their trades along the path of the former British empire–from Canada to Australia, the United States, and South Africa. They come from an impoverished China, but they move now in other circles. Ironically, it is the experience of colonialism (here embodied by the personal patronage of former British missionary Elsie Tu) that makes this movement and this upward mobility possible.

 

At one point, Rubie pays a visit to her family home and shop. It is filled with the details of a marginal, small merchant’s existence, including the outdoor tables and shop, the bare floor of the main living room, the worn table used as part of the elevated family shrine, the special, round table top brought in for the family gathering, the padded, old-fashioned vest and trousers worn by her mother. It becomes clear Rubie has not always led a solidly bourgeois existence. It may seem that the casting of the Eurasian actress Lindzay Chan in this role and the inclusion of her reading from the lengthy series of letters to Liv in English contradicts this picture of Rubie’s humble origins. Not only does this contradiction alienate the spectator from the character, but it also serves to highlight the indeterminate identity and position of the people of Hong Kong as Chinese British subjects, as educated and superstitious, as Western and Asian, as poor and struggling and established and well-to-do.

 

Rubie speaks in two voices–in fluent Cantonese and in impeccable British-accented English. Like Hong Kong itself, sometimes she looks Western, British, white and sometimes she looks Chinese and Asian. For example, in To Liv(e), she reads several of her letters directly addressing the camera in medium shots, seated against a British union jack, the American stars and stripes, and the flag of the People’s Republic of China. Interestingly, when she is shot in front of the Chinese flag, the lighting of her hair accentuates its reddish highlights. The light allows her to blend in with the flag at the same time it emphasizes her distinctiveness as a Eurasian performer. Rubie sometimes plays the role of a British subject, the role of an ethnic Chinese, the role of an Asian American immigrant, and, most importantly, the role of a character of an indeterminate identity.

 

In Crossings, Rubie tells another story about her origins. She explains her features as a throwback to the Tang Dynasty when she must have acquired some European ancestor from exchanges on the Silk Route. The fact that Rubie’s ethnic and cultural hybridity needs to be explained at all is itself telling. Addressing the reception of To Liv(e), Evans Chan has commented on critics who demand an “authentic” Hong Kong subject:

 

One controversial issue the film does occasion seems to be the establishment of 'the (post-)colonial subject,' hence the problematic status of the letters which are written in English.... I can understand the film's identity being characterized as schizophrenic, however, the notion that English is alien to the film's yet-to-be-post colonial identity is curious. After all, English is still primarily the official language of Hong Kong, where three major English dailies and two English TV channels permeate the everyday life of the educated class. Legal proceedings are conducted in English and Chinese politicians make speeches in English at the Legislative Council. If an average Hong Kong citizen speaks little English, that proves how linguistic schizophrenia may turn out to be a colonial legacy that will take some time, provided the will, to eradicate. ...That Hong Kong is a linguistically hybridized being is a fact that the film is not obliged to transcend. (5)

 

Rubie functions as the voice of Hong Kong, expressing, through her letters in To Liv(e) and her diary and appearances on the television news as an “expert” insider in Crossings, the hopes and fears of her community. Her identity and the identity of that community may be difficult to pin down as they slip among Britain, America, Hong Kong, and China, between the lower small merchant classes and the upwardly mobile professionals, between a “traditional” older generation and a more urbane younger one. Rubie, however, manages to embody this cacophony of “voices.”

 

Rubie is more than a “mouth,” however; she is also an “ear.” Throughout To Liv(e), the “ear” appears again and again as a motif associated with both Hong Kong as a place and Rubie as a character. Near the end of the film, the painting John has been working on throughout is revealed to be a picture of an ear. To break the tension of her brother’s departure, John orchestrates a Vincent Van Gogh practical joke with a bloody cloth over the side of his face and a fake, severed ear. Still unsteady from having just prevented her brother’s attempted suicide, Rubie faints at the sight of the phony severed ear and falls into a dream in which the ear reappears.

 

Figure 5: Dream sequence with the severed ear featuring John (Fung Kin Chung) and Rubie (Lindzay Chan) in To Liv(e) (production still).
Figure 6: Dream sequence featuring Tony (Wong Yiu-Ming) and Teresa (Josephine Ku) as Rubie imagines them as a self-destructive and troubled couple.

 

In her last letter to Liv, Rubie refers to George Bernard Shaw’s trip to Hong Kong in 1933:

 

Hong Kong 1933 didn't seem to exist for Bernard Shaw, except as a bad ear messed up by the British for communication with China. And an imperfect ear we've always been--as a bastardized link between a China weighed down by tradition and the clamorous demands of modernity. (Chan 61)

 

Throughout both films, Rubie is this same kind of “bastardized” ear, understanding English (and, through that, the perspectives of the British, American, and international community represented by Liv Ullmann) and Chinese (through Cantonese, she understands the Hong Kong Chinese and, through Mandarin, she understands the “greater China” community). Her trained, cultivated ear can appreciate experimental satiric theatre as well as Italo Calvino and the films of Ingmar Bergman. Like the organic intellectual, she can “hear” the marginalized and dispossessed as well as the bourgeoisie. Like the diasporic intellectual, she can “hear” the subtleties of the official and unofficial proclamations of various governments and other institutions.

 

Indeed, Rubie moves in a social world that is marked by this cultural and linguistic hybridity. This “floating world” of transnational, petit bourgeois labor includes artists, professionals, activists, journalists, among others, who are young, educated, culturally astute, and mobile. Although business people, artists, theatrical performers, and professionals like lawyers and doctors find their way into commercial popular culture, intellectuals seldom make a serious appearance in the cinema (see Ross). To Liv(e) and Crossings, therefore, are unusual.

 

In both To Liv(e) and Crossings, Rubie’s circle is rich in characters who are involved in a variety of artistic and intellectual endeavors. Again, like Bergman and Godard, Chan favors educated, thoughtful, cultured protagonists. In To Liv(e), Rubie’s boyfriend John busily works on his paintings and reads to Tony from Calvino’s Invisible Cities; Rubie attends experimental dance performances (“Exhausted Silkworms” on Tian’anmen, “Nuclear Goddess” on Daya Bay, China’s first nuclear power plant, constructed in suspiciously close proximity to Hong Kong); Rubie’s brother’s girlfriend, Teresa (Josephine Ku), relaxes as an experimental video piece plays on her television; Rubie quotes George Bernard Shaw and The New York Times in her letters to Liv.

 

Figure 7: “Nuclear Goddess” performed by Karen Suen and South ASLI dancers (production still).
Figure 8: Rubie and her artist boyfriend, John in To Liv(e) (production still).

 

This world is not only cultured but cosmopolitan. Rubie’s friends and relatives are part of a global society. In addition to Rubie’s elder brother in Canada and younger brother on his way to Australia, Rubie’s circle includes the interracial couples (Chris and Leanne, Trini and her husband), ex-patriots like Elsie Tu, overseas Chinese like Tony’s old flame Michelle, on a trip back from the United States, and many others.

 

Crossings extends Rubie’s circle even more. Again, Rubie functions as a bridge between various groups. Rubie befriends Mo-Yung (Anita Yuen), who is an illegal visitor to New York in search of an errant boyfriend. In this case, Mo-Yung acts as a fulcrum with Rubie on one side of the scale and Mo-Yung’s gangster boyfriend, Benny (Simon Yam), on the other side. Rubie and Benny battle over Mo-Yung. Rubie tries to divorce her from her destructive relationship with Benny, and Benny tries to find Mo-Yung either to use her to get to a cache of drugs or to take possession of her heart.

 

Artists, writers, and filmmakers have a long history of using criminals and gangsters as more than objects for social or psychological studies. Indeed, filmmakers as diverse as Godard, Bresson, Fassbinder, John Woo, and Ho Hsiao-hsien have used petty gangsters as cinematic “alter egos,” articulating more than the concerns of petty hoods. The character of Benny is crafted in this tradition. It is difficult to tell whether Benny is a drug trafficker and pimp masquerading as a fine art photographer or a sensitive artist doing a photo-essay, “Countdown to 1997,” who toys with a gangster identity. The photographs Mo-Yung spreads on her bed are as concrete as the drugs Benny’s other girlfriend Mabel cleans on their dining room table. Both serve as visual manifestations of Benny’s character, although it must be granted that the white powder carries more narrative weight than the photographs.

 

Since the silent era, the gangster has been used in film to concretize and contemplate economic relations. He is an outsider who serves as a mirror for the society he haunts. Like the intellectual, he has been produced by and has arisen out of a certain milieu, but he is deviant, an implicit critic of the society that produced him. At this point in time, the gangster increasingly functions as an emblem of transnational economic relations. In Crossings, the comment is made that Marco Polo brought two elements of Chinese culture to Italy, i.e., pasta and the Mafia. Both food and crime continue to cross borders to exert their influence transnationally. The gangster is a sinister citizen of the world. He has become part of the Diaspora–along with intellectuals, legitimate merchants and business people, students, skilled workers and professionals (particularly in medicine), etc.

 

Benny is a hybrid, a gangster-intellectual. Like Rubie, he has humble roots in Hong Kong’s underclasses; however, he transcended his origins through the drug trade rather than through painting like John, the medical profession like Tony, or journalism/social work like Rubie. He is a fitting object for Mo-Yung’s “wrong love,” since the uncertainty of his relationship to her finally comes out on the side of genuine emotion. After using her to smuggle drugs and denying any feelings for her to Mabel, he gives up his freedom and takes a police bullet in the back when he realizes Mo-Yung is having a miscarriage because of his reckless attempt to escape from the law. More than the tenderness in his relationship with Mo-Yung elevates him within the narrative, however. Crossings portrays Benny as a pensive gangster who can appreciate African traditional art, who has a certain flair for fashion, and who looks at his trade in historical terms as a response to the British push to sell opium in China that occasioned the Opium Wars. Since America supposedly encouraged the trade further through its involvement in the politics of the Golden Triangle, Benny justifies his trade as a political act of resistance–getting back at American imperialists by poisoning the population through the drug trade. When Rubie meets Benny in prison, however, he has again taken on the persona of the hardened criminal, the face he used in his interactions with Mabel. Aside from a few brief moments with Mo-Yung, Benny never manages to voice a substantial social critique.

 

Figure 9: Mo-Yung (Anita Yuen) bundled up against the cold in Crossings (production still).

 

The character of Mo-Yung comes a bit closer. Unlike Benny, Rubie, and her relatives, Mo-Yung was born in Suzhou, in mainland China, into an educated family, descended from unassimilated non-Han invaders centuries ago. Her father, an engineer, was forced to kneel on broken glass during the Cultural Revolution. Taking the family away from the excesses of China’s political campaign, Mo-Yung’s family found itself downwardly mobile in Hong Kong, the father finding work as a carpenter. Mo-Yung’s name marks her as a mainlander, as specifically from Suzhou. When she asked to change it as an adolescent, her father questioned her desire: “Are you so eager to conform? To assimilate?” Thus, even in Hong Kong where she grew up, Mo-Yung is an outsider. The fact that she will leave is taken as a given by most in the film. Her family pushes her to marry a Canadian immigrant to ensure another escape from the People’s Republic after 1997. She has already rejected a plan for her to emigrate as a nurse, since she fears that, as a foreign nurse, she will be required to work exclusively with AIDS patients, under conditions she fears will not preclude her being infected. Finally, following Benny, Mo-Yung becomes an illegal alien in New York, sucked into his world of transnational trafficking in drugs and prostitutes. Mo-Yung is left to drift in New York until she meets her tragic end.

 

As in To Liv(e), the voice in Crossings is given to Rubie. Divorced now (presumably from John) and with a child left in Hong Kong, Rubie has been severed from her roots in Hong Kong’s lower middle classes to find herself administering to a similar community of overseas Chinese in New York. At one extreme, in her work in a community clinic, Rubie sees illegal immigrant women brought in to work in the sex industry in New York, including some who become infected with AIDS. She also becomes involved in the edges of the illegal drug trade through her relationship with Mo-Yung. At the other extreme, Rubie moves in a very different social sphere represented by one of her close male friends, a Mandarin-speaker. This character is gay, with a white boyfriend. He does experimental dance, dressed as a female character from Beijing opera, to a pop music beat, in a disco frequented by Asian transvestites. He speaks in Mandarin, she responds in Cantonese, and both translate for the American boyfriend in English.
These two cultural spheres overlap throughout the film, and come together most dramatically at Mo-Yung’s funeral. In this scene, the dancer performs a piece in which his defiantly thrown back shoulders, high aerial kicks, and simple male attire work in concert with wreaths denouncing violence against Asians from various community groups. Looking at this scene in conjunction with the scene featuring a similar dance performance, “Exhausted Silkworms” in To Liv(e), underscores the two extremes used to position the characters and events in both films. “Exhausted Silkworms” reenacts the violence of Tian’anmen and the funeral performance memorializes Mo-Yung, not as a victim of “wrong love,” but as a victim of random anti-Asian violence in the United States.

 

Here, the position of the global Hong Kong community hits two violent terminal points: one in the political fear prompted by the suppression of the 1989 Tian’anmen demonstrations and the other in the social fear of racial violence in New York City. Caught between these two violent extremes, Rubie tries to sort out her own position and identity. At one point in Crossings, Rubie is on an elevated train platform, putting on lipstick. Taking the position of a stalker, the hand-held camera moves in on Rubie. When she is framed in a close-up, Rubie turns and runs. The camera then turns to reveal Joey (Ted Brunetti), who addresses the camera directly, “Blood must flow. What if I push you on the tracks?” The film cuts away to a street person screaming on the sidewalk as the elevated train screeches in the background. A frightened Rubie is shown escaping on the train; a musical bridge connects this scene with a scene of Rubie writing in her journal in her apartment. She recalls a similar incident that happened the week before. The flashback shows Rubie reading the paper on the elevated platform. In this case, rather than taking the point of view of the stalker, the camera takes Rubie’s perspective as an African American man directly confronts the camera (i.e., Rubie) and lashes out at her, “Man, I hate you Japs….” He rambles on incoherently about a blood reckoning to be paid. Back at her apartment, Rubie continues in her diary: “Would it have helped if I’d told him I’m not Japanese, but a Chinese from the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong? Where would I have felt protected? Britain? China?”

 

While the cosmopolitan world of Hong Kong or New York promises a certain freedom associated with the hybridity of the metropolitan experience, it also represents a world in which identity is cast adrift and there is no safe haven. Joey’s psychosis, which these parallel scenes show is not uncommon, revolves around a mis-recognition of the Asian woman. This mis-recognition operates on several levels. Joey stalks Rubie, but, under the assumption that any Asian woman would satisfy his blood lust, he kills Mo-Yung. Joey is driven into this delirium by an encounter with an Asian transvestite, whom, in M. Butterfly fashion, he mistakes for a woman. Indeed, Joey mistakes all the Asian women he encounters, from his prostitute girlfriend in Thailand to the newly arrived mainland Chinese prostitute he visits in a New York massage parlor, for his “dream girl,” submissive, compliant, subservient, and posing no threat to his own uncertain sexuality. In his delirium, Joey even mistakes Mo-Yung for a dummy, raving happily about passing the “test” to see if he could tell the difference between a real person and a mannequin. His racism levels all identity, turning all Asian women into objects. When Joey’s sister tries to explain her brother’s mental illness to Rubie at Mo-Yung’s funeral, Rubie’s only response is, “It could have been me! Don’t you see, your brother was stalking me. It could have been me.” Between Trini’s analysis of her position as a “British object” in To Liv(e) and Joey’s interchangeability of Asian women as objects in Crossings, the voice of the diasporic intellectual becomes silent. If Rubie’s role as an intellectual is to listen and speak for her constituency, she (and, perhaps, the filmmaker who created her) ends up silent in between two worlds marked by violence.

 

It can also be noted that Joey does not inhabit a world totally dissimilar to Rubie’s. As a public school teacher in New York, he is like Rubie part of a class of educators, social workers, media workers, etc., who can be loosely grouped as intellectuals. He has a secure job; the principal of the school laments the fact she cannot fire him, even though he alternately brutalizes and ignores his students, because he has tenure and is “competent until proven incompetent, sane until proven insane.” He has disposable income to travel to Thailand. Also, like Rubie, he seems to be upwardly mobile, living with a sister whose accent and demeanor point to working class roots. If Benny represents the intellectual as gangster and Joey represents the intellectual as madman, Rubie represents the intellectual as something different; i.e., as a woman within the Diaspora.

 

The Ear Is Attached to a Woman

 

If, as noted above, Rubie functions in both films as a public, intellectual ear that is able to hear and validate the various voices that present themselves, she also serves as a private, personal ear. In her Crossings diary, she speaks to herself as well as to the film’s spectators. In both films, Rubie listens to an array of personal problems voiced by those in her circle of family, friends, and acquaintances. With few exceptions, all the film’s characters talk to Rubie, and Rubie listens. As this narrative ear, Rubie holds the plots of both films together, giving them a structure, logic, and certain order.

 

Many directors are known for establishing ongoing relationships with actresses who represent the filmmakers’ concerns and give entree into other realms involving women, the female psyche, and issues concerning feminine subjectivity. Bergman’s relationship with Liv Ullmann comes immediately to mind. In this case, Chan develops a rapport with Lindzay Chan in these two features that allows him to explore not only issues of cultural hybridity but also issues involving women and their concerns. Moving from the textuality of the political discourses of the films to the subjectivity of the “women’s film,” To Liv(e) and Crossings, in their stylistic and generic hybridity, highlight issues that go beyond newspaper headlines and immigration statistics. Although Chan works with a Brechtian/Godardian alienation from his characters, using them often as types to illustrate particular points, the filmmaker also uses these characters in more conventional ways, underscoring their individuality, allowing them to speak as distinct entities as well as representatives of ideological positions and abstract social categories.

 

To illustrate this point, it might be instructive to look at two parallel scenes, one from To Liv(e) and the other from Crossings. Both scenes involve Rubie having a tête-à-tête with another woman. Each scene points to the intimacy between the women. Each features a discussion of the situation of women drifting between countries, roles, and emotions, adding to narrative information, but also standing alone as discourses separate from the public pronouncements of Rubie’s letters or her appearances on American television.

 

In To Liv(e), Rubie meets with her brother’s fiancée, Teresa (Josephine Ku), at Victoria Peak, overlooking the Hong Kong skyline. The two are seated near a ledge, on opposite sides of the frame, with the cityscape between them. Teresa voices her concerns about going to Australia. She also talks about her divorce and difficulties maintaining a relationship with her son studying in the United Kingdom. On a short visit to Hong Kong, the son went shopping with his father rather than taking time to see his mother, Teresa. Because of her divorce and the death of her mother, Teresa feels cast adrift emotionally. Rubie listens and sympathizes with Teresa. The sounds of the city below can be heard throughout the scene. Rubie moves from her position screen right to sit close to Teresa; the camera slowly moves in to frame them close together on the ledge. When Rubie tries to reassure Teresa that there will be plenty of Hong Kong emigrants to befriend in Australia, Teresa counters that she and Tony want to escape Hong Kong to get away from its people (i.e., those, like Tony and Rubie’s parents who disapprove of a union between a younger man and a divorced, older woman). The camera moves out again, to show Rubie and Teresa in relation to the city, as the two embrace each other at the scene’s conclusion.

 

In Crossings, Rubie meets Mo-Yung in a café near Times Square. The camera is positioned outside as the scene begins, then moves inside to frame Rubie and Mo-Yung silhouetted against the café’s window as the traffic of New York passes by outside. Throughout the scene, the camera moves between the two women, using a vase with dried flowers on the table as a pivotal point.

 

Figure 10: Mo-Yung (Anita Yuen) in Crossings (production still).

 

Mo-Yung talks about coming from Suzhou; Rubie talks about her features and the imagined Silk Route ancestor. Both laugh that they are “two barbarians invading New York.”

 

Figure 11: Mo-Yung in Crossings (production still).

 

The camera cuts away to a shot of Mo-Yung framed through the café window, and the mood changes. They wonder about Mo-Yung’s missing acquaintance, Carmen, who had also been involved with Benny. Rubie fills Mo-Yung in on her own situation, and her desire to get a green card and open America as a possibility for her son. Mo-Yung asks, “What if your son doesn’t like America and blames you?” When Rubie replies that he can always go back, Mo-Yung counters, “Do you think you can recreate the past just like that?” The scene ends on a close shot of Mo-Yung putting out her cigarette in an ashtray near the dried flowers, flanked by the empty coffee cups.

 

These two scenes highlight elements that move the narratives into the realm of the women’s film. In these scenes, the emphasis is on the relationship between women, their solidarity in the face of the trials of immigration as well as in the face of changing sexual mores and family relationships. Here, as friends, mothers, lovers, ex-wives, fiancées, and confidantes, Rubie, Teresa, and Mo-Yung illustrate the personal dimension of the political concerns of 1997. Women experience a different type of “crossing” than men. Traditional roles for women dissolve in the Diaspora. Families become unhinged, scattered; romantic relationships become more fleeting. Cast adrift by a desire to escape from rigid families, ex-husbands, and the feeling of being alienated from the traditional world in which they were born and bred, these women move off to Australia and New York with a different sense of loss, different fears, and for reasons that go far beyond the political dynamics of 1997. Following Rubie as the “ear,” the camera in both scenes invites the spectator to share these intimate moments.

 

These two scenes are not unique in either To Liv(e) or Crossings. Rather, they form part of a pattern of scenes in which women’s issues are voiced and Rubie listens to her girlfriends’ concerns. In To Liv(e), for example, Teresa will only discuss her fears of death and abandonment with Rubie; Tony must eavesdrop outside the bedroom door. In Crossings, female characters as diverse as the unnamed, unseen AIDS-infected prostitute at the clinic, Joey’s sister, and a next-door neighbor seek out Rubie as an ear for their stories. Mo-Yung tells the story of her family to Rubie rather than Benny. These acts of speaking and listening among the female characters propel both films out from the orbits of the political essay or the crime story.

 

Figures 12, 13, and 14: Mo-Yung (Anita Yuen) and Rubie (Lindzay Chan)
in Central Park in Crossings (production stills).

 

Looking at the films from this perspective, as love stories and family melodramas, To Liv(e) and Crossings fit within three related subgenres that have become quite popular in Hong Kong after Thatcher’s visit to Beijing. The trend picked up even more after June 4, 1989. One subgenre features romantic entanglements and family problems that arise in Hong Kong around the issue of emigration; e.g., Shu Kei’s Hu Du Men/Stagedoor (1996). To Liv(e) fits squarely in this subgenre. The second subgenre involves the trials and tribulations faced by new immigrants to America, Canada, Australia; some examples include Stanley Kuan’s Full Moon in New York (1990), Peter Chow’s Pickles Make Me Cry (1987), Clara Law’s Floating Life (1996). Crossings tends more toward this subgenre, although, like Allen Fong’s Just Like Weather (1986), it really blends the two. The third subgenre is hinted at through Mo-Yung’s story; it involves mainland Chinese abroad in Hong Kong. Examples include Mabel Cheung’s Illegal Immigrant (1985) and the recent hit, Peter Chan’s Comrades: Almost a Love Story (1996) (see Law Kar.)

 

In these subgenres, the relationship between stories about the overseas Chinese and stories about Chinese or Asian Americans becomes more problematic. Another set of categories begins to dissolve as filmmakers born in Hong Kong, trained in the United States, living sometimes in Hong Kong, sometimes in America, make films about people who are themselves between Hong Kong and America. Indeed, the Hong Kong/American connection, including figures like Bruce Lee as well as filmmakers as diverse as Tsui Hark and Evans Chan, is not unique along the edges of what is usually described as Asian cinema. Ang Lee, Peter Wang, and Edward Yang represent a Taiwan connection, and Chen Kai-ge is the best known of those from the mainland who have settled in the States. Ho Quang Minh connects Vietnam and Switzerland, while Anh Hung Tran with Scent of Green Papaya (1993) has given the world its most critically acclaimed film in Vietnamese about Vietnam, totally set in Vietnam, without leaving France.

 

Like the in-between, transnational, transcultural characters they depict, To Liv(e) and Crossings also defy easy classification. However, while identities may be uncertain and fluctuating, the issues these characters embody remain concrete and disturbingly fixed.

 

Endings

 

To Liv(e) concludes with cautious optimism on two fronts. In her last letter to Liv Ullmann, Rubie ends with the hope that China, Vietnam, and, by extension, Hong Kong will improve their respective situations so that all, including Rubie and Liv, will be able to meet as friends. Rubie concludes the film on a note of good humor. In fact, she signs her letter, “Love, Rubie.” The last image of the film shows Tony and Teresa, saved from near suicide and break-up, alight from their taxi at the airport, baggage in hand, on their way to Australia.

 

Crossings, on the other hand, ends on a pessimistic note. Rubie burns incense in memory of Mo-Yung on the subway platform where she was murdered. The last shot shows a graveyard in Hong Kong. Earlier, Benny and Mo-Yung had had a tryst near that graveyard, and Benny told the story of his mother being buried there after working herself to death to support the family. Rubie has promised to return Mo-Yung’s bones to Hong Kong, presumably to that same cemetery.

 

While To Liv(e) ends with death averted and hope in the future, Crossings concludes with the finality of death and the uncertainty of Rubie’s future. She returns to Hong Kong with Mo-Yung’s bones, but it is not certain whether or not she will return to New York, stay in Hong Kong, or go elsewhere. Since, after death, even bones continue to drift between continents, Rubie’s continued “Crossings” between roles and professions, between nation-states, and between Asia and the West also seem to be one of the few certainties in a very uncertain, fictional world. That global filmmakers themselves will continue to drift and make films about this “floating world” of displacement and hybridity also seems fairly certain. To bring Chan’s pessimism back around to a more hopeful note, we might consider this from Bhabha’s “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative and the Margins of the Modern Nation:”

 

For it is by living on the borderline of history and language, on the limits of race and gender, that we are in a position to translate the differences between them into a kind of solidarity. (170)

 

Notes

 

1. Recently, the term “transcultural” has begun to replace a number of related terms (e.g., “cross-cultural,” “international,” “multicultural”) in a number of disciplines (particularly medicine, psychology, and education). Film studies has begun to follow suit. While following on the widespread use of the concept of “transnationalism” by political economists and sociologists, the use of “transcultural” by scholars in the arts, humanities, social sciences, and cultural studies also seems to point to the inadequacy of these other terms in analyzing the increasing globalization of culture.

 

2. Plot synposis of To Live: Rubie (Lindzay Chan) lives in Hong Kong with her artist boyfriend, John (Fung Kin Chung). In December 1989, Rubie becomes angered by a statement made by Liv Ullmann about the inhumane treatment of Vietnamese refugees by the Hong Kong authorities. In the wake of the events in Beijing that June, Rubie questions Ullmann’s timing in a letter she composes and addresses to the Scandinavian actress. Passages from the letter punctuate the rest of the film as Rubie must decide, along with members of her family and circle of Hong Kong artists and intellectuals, whether to stay or leave Hong Kong before July 1, 1997. Throughout the film, Rubie talks to a range of people about their feelings regarding the turnover.

 

Rubie’s brother Tony (Wong Yiu-Ming) prepares to immigrate to Australia with his fiancée, Teresa (Josephine Ku). Teresa, however, has mixed feelings about the departure and about her relationship with Tony. Older, divorced, and estranged from her son, Teresa is prone to morbid thoughts and depression. She is thoroughly disliked by Tony and Rubie’s parents, and she fears loosing the younger Tony to another woman. The stormy relationship comes to a head when Tony threatens suicide after a jealous scene at a party.

 

3. Plot synopsis of Crossings: A red shoe, symbol of romantic happiness and the joys of marriage in traditional Chinese lore, is all that remains of Mo-Yung (Anita Yuen), a victim of a stalker’s violence on a New York subway platform. Mo-Yung had come to New York, against her parents’ wishes and illegally, to pursue her boyfriend, Benny (Simon Yam). Mo-Yung thinks Benny is a photographer, but he is actually an international drug smuggler. Pursuing Benny, Mo-Yung rubs against the seamier elements of New York as she unsuspectingly plays cat-and-mouse with a shipment of Benny’s contraband. Rubie (Lindzay Chan) is a social worker in New York, who befriends Mo-Yung. Joey (Ted Brunetti) is a psychotic school teacher, who has a fetish for Asian women. Joey stalks Rubie, whom he has seen as a community spokeswoman on television. Mistaking Mo-Yung for Rubie, he kills Mo-Yung on a subway platform.

 

4. Neither film discussed here makes any pretense at investigating the events in May-June, 1989, in Tian’anmen. For the most insightful treatment to date in any medium, see Carma Hinton’s controversial documentary film and Web site, Gate of Heavenly Peace.

Works Cited

 

  • Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.
  • Chan, Evans. “Forward to To Liv(e).” Evans Chan’s To Liv(e): Screenplay and Essays. Ed. Tak-wai Wong. Hong Kong: U of Hong Kong, Department of Comparative Literature, 1996.
  • —. Crossings. Perf. Ted Brunetti, Lindzay Chan, Simon Yam, and Anita Yuen. Riverside Productions, 1994.
  • —. To Liv(e). Perf. Lindzay Chan, Fung Kin Chung, Josephine Ku, and Wong Yiu-Ming. Riverside Productions, 1991.
  • Chen, Kuan-hsing. “The Formation of a Diasporic Intellectual: An Interview with Stuart Hall.” Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. Ed. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen. NY: Routledge, 1996.
  • Chow, Rey. Woman and Chinese Modernity: The Politics of Reading Between West and East. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1991.
  • —. Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993.
  • Erens, Patricia Brett. “The Aesthetics of Protest: Evans Chan’s To Liv(e).” Evans Chan’s To Liv(e): Screenplay and Essays. Ed. Tak-wai Wong. Hong Kong: U of Hong Kong, Department of Comparative Literature, 1996.
  • Francia, Luis. “Asian Cinema and Asian American Cinema: Separated by a Common Language.” Cinemaya 9 (Autumn 1990): 36-39.
  • Fore, Steve. “Golden Harvest Films and the Hong Kong Movie Industry in the Realm of Globalization.” The Velvet Light Trap 34 (Fall 1994): 40-58.
  • Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. NY: International Publishers Co., 1971.
  • Hall, Stuart. “New Ethnicities.” Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. Ed. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen. NY: Routledge, 1996.
  • Hinton, Carma. The Gate of Heavenly Peace. http://www.nmis.org/gate/
  • Jameson, Fredric. The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995.
  • Kaplan, Caren. “The Politics of Location in Transnational Feminist Practice.” Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices. Eds. Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1994.
  • Kar, Law, ed. Overseas Chinese Figures in Cinema. Hong Kong: The 16th Hong Kong International Film Festival, 1992.
  • Kolker, Robert. The Altering Eye: Contemporary International Cinema. NY: Oxford UP, 1983.
  • Lu, Sheldon, ed. Transnational Chinese Cinemas: Indentity, Nationhood, Gender. Honolulu: U of Hawaii P, 1997.
  • Ross, Andrew. No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture. NY: Routledge, 1989.
  • Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. NY: Random House, 1994.
  • Shohat, Ella and Robert Stam, “The Politics of Multiculturalism in the Postmodern Age.” Unthinking Eurocentricism: Multiculturalism and the Media. London: Routledge, 1994.” 338-362
  • Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues. Ed. Sarah Horasym. NY: Routledge, 1990.
  • West, Cornel. “The New Cultural Politics of Difference.” The Cultural Studies Reader. Ed. Simon During. NY: Routledge, 1993.
  • Wollen, Peter. “Godard and Counter Cinema: Vent D’est.” Readings and Writings: Semiotic Counter-Strategies. London: Verso, 1982.
  • Wong, Tak-wai, ed. Evans Chan’s To Liv(e): Screenplay and Essays. Hong Kong: U of Hong Kong, Department of Comparative Literature, 1996.

Related Web Sites